The End of All Things
by Systemic Anomaly
Summary: The past is a vortex: we can never escape it. What happened on the Logos as they left for 01: from departure to the final, cataclysmic crash. Neo's narrative.


**Title: **The End of All Things

**Author:** Well, duh.

**Spoilers:** BIG ones for _Reloaded_, and equally big ones for _Revolutions_ in later chapters. God, I hate bringing the films into this.

**Pairing:** Neo/Trinity, if you can call it that. This is neither fluff nor porn nor... well... typical fic.

**Rating/Warnings: **R for violence, language, eventual gore(as far as I can tell), adult references, and possibly discreet sex.

**A/N:** All right. **One:** this is going to be posted in parts, much like a serial. I can't _do_ it all at once, and the impact might be greater this way, anyway. I'll try and keep it updated fairly regularly, but since this is technically about as much _fun_ as a root canal without the benefit of a sedative cocktail, don't ride me too hard about it. I'll do my best. Feedback helps, but I am not a feedback whore: I'll write the damn thing if it kills me... and even if not a single person reads it. **Two: **This is the story of what actually happened on the _Logos,_ from the moment of leaving to the final crash(and possibly beyond, if I feel brave enough). First-person -- like I could write it any other way? It actually was going to be third, to make it easier, but, somehow, it shifted. I've been asked to write this down by many, many people: so here it is. It took me a very long time to get this far. **Three:** PLEASE **do not **review this and tell me I've "fed up the dialogue from _Reloaded"_. facepalm. I _know_ that some of this is different from what was portrayed in the movie. That, dear Reader, is the entire _point._ Don't believe everything you see on TV. And **Four: **I know that this title has probably been used _to death,_ especially in other "fandoms": I tried to check, as well as toying with about half a dozen alternate titles. But, from the beginning, this is what I've called every version of my Word documents containing this piece. It's how I think of it. So deal. Thank you...

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When you finally, at last come to a decision like that, something that's that big, that... _final,_ it changes everything. And not just in the cliche way: it changes the way the light plays on your hands, for instance. The weight of your feet as you shift, and move. And something heavy settles into your heart, _around_ your heart, and you know that however much you might wish it, however much you might pray for things to change, nothing will ever be the way it was. Not now, not ever again. And yet there is still a kind of calm that settles into you, into your bones, when you know that the path you've finally chosen is the one you're meant to be on: an acceptance that is unshakable and leaves very little room for fear. Have you ever felt that way? There isn't any more questioning, any more doubt: all of the white noise of the mind that comes from that war of confusion inside is washed away on a tide of completion, and all that's left is the silence. The noiseless voice that says simply, _Yes. This is where all roads end: this is where the path leads and once you're at its end there is no more worrying about what to do then, because arriving is all you're meant to do. This is the curtain call of the beating of your heart._

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The silence spoke volumes: how lame is that, as a statement? Standard-issue melodrama. But in the end, words dry up and die in the face of the profound. To speak them would be to kill something that _has_ no words, no name. Only a place in your soul, where it resonates like a quiet hum in the blood, as deeply a part of you as the song of blood through tiring veins. As deep as breath.

For a long time we sat there -- or at least it felt like a long time, how many endless moments had passed, I don't know -- watching the receding glow of the _Hammer_ as well as the sheltered blackness of home. _Home_. What it's like to watch the life you had fade out from the corner of your eye, to know that the laughter and tears, the music, the sweat and grease and light, continued with you no longer a part of it... it's like wandering a dark snowy street long after the sun has set, wrapped up against a bitter, biting cold and seeing as you pass the glow of golden light from within house after house: wondering vaguely what dramas are playing out behind those windows -- people laughing, fighting, curled up reading in front of a fire, doing homework, making love -- the trappings of life, shut up against the night while you stand without, disconnected, in shadow.

She waited silently until I had shrugged into my shoulder harness -- she had always been faster at those things, so very efficient with a speed born of long practice and second nature -- and I remember how oddly comforting it was to have those straps fastened across my chest and hips: how, deep down, it was just one more layer of quiet resignation. With every movement, every familiar gesture, it was like I was speaking to her without having to open my mouth: _Yes, we really are about to do this. Yes, when I said I had to go, I meant it: I don't know why, Trin, but I do. Yes, I'm scared, fucking terrified, but even that's muted now: all I really feel is a soft calm and a soul-deep gladness that wherever my end lies, it will be with you. The two of us, together, as it should be. Yes, I trust you, and your trust in me is not misplaced. No, there really isn't any turning back now._ I loved her so much that if she had said to me at that moment, _"Neo, I don't want you to do this, this is insane, let's call the whole thing off", _I would have: but I also loved her entirely _because_ those words would never cross her lips. Not hers. Not my Trinity. I could read fear in every line of her face, the set of her jaw, but warring with this was an aura of acceptance, much like my own. A quiet determination that wherever this led, at least she'd be by my side.

Does that sound like I'm making her out to be some spineless damsel-in-distress, blindly following "her man" into Certain Doom? Far from it. But there was always something that set us apart, some layer of... what? Predestination? Something, that bound us together as surely as anything ever had. A darkness that followed us, even in joy: a radiant power in our union that defied all logic and rationale. _It's different for us, Trin,_ I'd said once, near sleep, in a half-delirious state of exhaustion and emotional overload: a rare expression of bluntness. Fighting to explain what I felt but could never, for all my trying, put into words. _Most people... the rest of them... they act like they have forever. And that's not what I mean... but I don't know how to say it. With us... we're never together because it's convenient, or because we're craving release, or whatever the hell it is. Even when we're being slow, even when it doesn't **seem** desperate... you and I... we fuck like we're dying._

And when she looked at me, unsmiling but with that spark in her eyes that refused to fade no matter how utterly hopeless, how_ insane_ all this might seem, when she looked me over briefly -- that glance, even now, sending a faint shiver of something like pleasure worming into my gut and setting the hairs on the back of my neck prickling -- and asked me softly, "Ready?" She was saying _Yes, Neo: I am here with you, beside you, and I trust you. Wherever this takes us, I trust you, and I believe in you. I always have. As long as we're together, even if it is as far from all right as it could ever be -- it'll still be all right. In the end, it'll be all right._

My shoulders squared, my knees parted and ankles crossed in that way I always had -- maybe it came from being uneasy, still, in a cockpit seat -- and my hands lying on my thighs, I parted my lips a little, wet them, and then closed them again. Nothing to say. I nodded to her, and in an instant she was all business again: tugging on her own harness to make sure it was secure -- but not too tight to restrict her piloting, she was weird about that, one of a thousand quirks I'd grown to love -- pivoting to fully face the controls, taking me from her line of sight. It could have been any one of a hundred other ignitions: only the weighted silence between us and the set of her shoulders betrayed any deeper significance. And silently I watched her work, in my heart rejoicing for this chance to follow her with my eyes, to trace her profile, already so deeply engraved in my memory. The flex and tilt of her muscled arms, wiry but powerful from years of being one of the crew, tossing scrap metal, lugging welders' equipment, hefting bundles of wiring

_(and so powerful when she held me clasped in their circle, crushing me to her chest so that I could feel her heartbeat racing, racing. Locking me into an embrace as I breathed against her lips: or when she cradled me against her shoulder, filling my lungs with the scent that **was** her, rocking me as I lay haunted with demons more real than anything with horns and claws)_

and doing what needed to be done. The curve of her neck, the way her dark hair, always so excruciatingly, carefully _restrained_ when she was jacked in -- to the point where I had often held myself back from reaching out and tousling it deliberately -- had come loose a little from behind one ear, shadowing the line of her cheekbone. And something small and sad came loose inside _me,_ then, and I bit my lip a little but said nothing. We'd said everything that needed to be said, already. In more ways than words. I might be clumsy, in the real world, but even I knew that much.

My eyes followed her hand as it rose, and when she punched it I was so prepared for the rising whine of the machinery cycling up that when there was a hollow _clack_ and the cockpit lights went out in a shudder of shadows, I simply sat there dumbly for a moment. I think we both did: kind of a shared _What the hell?_ But of course, Trin recovered first, like someone born to it. She scowled at the console. "Engine's still firing," she murmured, and for some reason in that moment I loved her more fiercely than I'd ever thought the human heart capable of love. Mushy, no? But back when Thomas Anderson had spent nights either gazing into his computer screen as if _someone_ had the answers or trolling drug-hazed raves in search of some sort of salvation, rebelling against the system in his tiny insignificant ways, the thought of a love so powerful that he would follow it to the end of all things seemed more far-fetched than any artificial intelligence using humans as souped-up batteries.

But then again: Thomas Anderson had been a whole other man, a whole other life. One that was as gone now as thoughts of Zion, of gold-glow evenings and shared smiles across a marketplace.

My name is Neo.

We exchanged a glance, and I could have sworn I saw the faintest of smiles touch the corner of her mouth. Maybe I was just imagining it, trying to convince myself that she had no fear at all in the face of things... but it looked a whole hell of a lot like the expression she'd worn when cocking a brow at me and saying _You might be a lot of things, but you'll never be a pilot, Neo._

"Must be a fuse," she said, and already she was moving, minimalist grace. I had a moment to reflect -- Christ, how many times had I thought these same things? -- on how perfectly, elegantly _efficient_ her motions were, no movement wasted: and then she was rising from her seat. "I'll check it out," and her eyes said _No problem, I'll handle this. These old ships, I'm not surprised. Hang in there, Neo. I'll be back. _There was no argument, no discussion: as far as the ships went, she was a thousand times more skilled than I'd ever be, a thousand times quicker, more effective. And so I just nodded a little: even though the sight of her retreating from the corner of my eye made my heart jump and skitter in my chest. I didn't want to be apart from her, even for a moment, and that realization did not surprise me.

As her footsteps faded out in the general direction of the lower levels, I had time to myself... which was exactly what I _didn't_ want. Christ knew I'd had enough of it just lately. Shifting uneasily in the embrace of the shoulder harness, uncrossing my ankles and bending my knees up, I found my thoughts skittering away from 01, from whatever it was I'd come out here, in the end, to do. From the internal debate of whether or not I was simply insane, unhinged from the constant pressure of the Zionites and Morpheus, all expecting something extraordinary.

_Neo, please, my son. Watch over him. Neo, my daughter. It's her first crew assignment, she's only eighteen. Neo, my husband: we have a child on the way, a miracle child, it's been five years we've been trying. Neo, is it true? Can you really do those things? Neo._

Or from the thick, meaty guilt of knowing that it _hadn't _been that the Prophecy was a lie, exactly: just that I had let myself be ruled by my human emotions rather than the thought of the entire human _race. _That'd have ensured his undying respect, I'm sure: _Hey, sorry, Morpheus, it wasn't your fault. I could have called off the war before all these people died, but it came down to that or saving Trinity, and in my Onely ego I decided that I could have both. Y'know, like that Stephen King novel? "I reject this choice: I will have both or I will have neither"? Nevermind rationality or common sense: I figured that when it came down to it, I'd find a way to thwart all of it. One way or another._

Yeah.

And so, like seeking a rock when you're drowning, my thoughts turned back -- or tried -- to Trinity, to the last moments we'd spent together in her rumpled bed, a silence broken by the desperation of devotion: I was so deeply lost in recollection that whatever sounds I might have heard from below caught my attention only vaguely, as Trin doing whatever she needed to do to get the ship up and running again... and her voice was so sharply clear in my mind that when I actually _heard_ it a moment later, I thought at first that it was simply a projection of my memory.

But this wasn't the soft-spoken, nasalized "Neo" of her quiet hallelujah: nor was it any other tone I'd heard from her in the recent past. By the time it had actually _registered_ in my mind for what it was, it had come again: the crackle of static that made my heart stop completely and then start again in triple-time, and her ragged call:

"Neo! It's Bane!" Hiss, crumple, blur. "...psy...!"

An echoing _clang!_, and then silence. And by the time the final syllable had echoed through the cockpit, I had torn off the shoulder harness and was already moving.

Si? Sy? _What?_

But there had been panic in her voice. Real _panic._

Instinct led me to the back corner of the main deck, where the crew of the _Neb_ had kept their stash of weapons: however, this _wasn't_ the _Neb,_ and all my frantic, desperate groping turned up was a bundle of disconnected wiring and a socket wrench. Keening low in my throat, unaware that the sound was coming from me, I swore viciously with no breath left in my lungs and nearly grabbed up the wrench as a weapon until I saw the pile near the back entryway and snatched up the gun without bothering to check if it was even functional. My feet were moving before I had given them the command to run.

_She's Trinity,_ I tried to tell myself as I skidded along the deck, too aware of how loud my approach must be. _Nothing can touch her. It never has, and it never will. She's a match for you._

But in the back of my mind, some part insisted on reminding me of just how _small_ she was, how too-thin, how wiry---

_(The way she had been wrapped around me, that night, her legs locked around my hips, arms desperate across my shoulders... ragged nails biting into my skin in a pain that tasted like ecstasy and everything gold: riding the crest with her and I'd actually lifted her off the bed -- clinging to me and so very small in that moment, letting me lift her, so light)_

---and in my mind's eye I could suddenly see Bane: tall, long-armed, _big._ _This isn't the Matrix,_ some horrible voice inside, there and gone before it had even registered. _If he's crazy, if he's dangerous, he might be able to---_

_You're strong, Trin. _A prayer. Nothing less. _Please be strong. Be as strong as I know you can be. Please, be okay... it's gotta be okay... _but these words were not coherent, not strung together in any way that made sense. They were just a pulse in my blood, an ache in my chest, a tremor in my fingers and my heart. In my mind, there was only one true, clear word.

I don't remember if my hands were sweating on the gun. I barely felt them at all: the thing might have been an extension of my arm, another limb, or a piece of dead steel that was somehow attached. I think somewhere, dimly, I knew that I had barely ever touched one before; some crew members could wield them as if they'd been born to it, but I had always been awkward at it... just like I was distantly aware of the rattling clang of my boots on the deck; my heart pounding in my chest, my throat, my fingertips. But the human mind does that: it takes in all this information, and yet... leaves room in the conscious awareness for only one driving impulse, one thought, one sensation.

One word.

My seven-letter prayer.

_Trinity._

I'm not sure that I ever fully understood the difference between the Matrix and the real world the way I did, at last, in that horrible endless instant. Understood how frail the human body can _be... _and how powerless. But when I came around that final corner, gun up and gangbusters just like every fearless hero in every movie I'd ever seen before I'd been unplugged, John Rambo oh yeah, every failproof plan of action I might have had dried up and died just as suddenly as the forward momentum of my feet. Maybe not my worst fear confirmed: but had it gotten any closer, I would have had nothing left to lose.

He had her around the waist with one arm -- _my Trinity --_ and by the looks of her arms, twisted up behind her back, he'd managed to pop out one of her shoulders somehow. Her body was arched back against his chest in a sick parallel of intimacy, and his other arm was locked around her throat in a gesture I knew well from the training programs: pressure on her windpipe with the bone of his wrist, gleaming silver of what looked like a knife or a scalpel -- _from where? -- _pressed to her pale skin. And with a thousand questions reeling through my mind, a thousand _Why_s and _How did he_s and _What does he want_s, the thing my awareness chose to seize on in that instant was the line of blood that was sketched across her throat. It seemed hallucinatory, unreal, because not twelve hours ago I had

_(lowered my head to that spot, listening to her ragged breath beside my ear, both of her small hands buried in my hair as her body arched beneath me and I kissed the pulse in her throat, closed my teeth gently on the softness of her skin and suckled there, exploring every flutter underneath my lips and trailing my mouth down to her collarbone, starkly defined but so beautiful)_

watched the light play off her throat as I listened to her heartbeat. And that image, that overpowering sense of time _folding_ back on itself, paralyzed me for a moment that was too long, too long. Even though it couldn't have been any more than the span of a single breath.

Somewhere deep in the back of my mind it registered that it looked like Trin had given as good as she'd gotten: there was blood sprayed from one side of his face to the other, his nose looked horribly _smashed_ somehow, twisted and then reattached... and one of his eyes was turning a spectacular shade of black. But none of this mattered at all: because in that moment a single twist of his wrist and...

...and then he spoke, and the rest of my rational thought was driven out of my mind.

_"Mister Anderson."_

I must have blinked: either way, his image seemed to shimmer for a moment. Unsteady. My hands tightened convulsively on the gun, and when he said something about "...as predictable in this world as you are in the other," I barely heard it. My mind was overloading, trying to comprehend, and I shook my head mutely: _What the hell?_

"He's insane," Trinity whispered, as though we were speaking of someone else, someone unaware of the discussion. The fear in her voice curdled my guts, dried up all the spit in my mouth and made me suck in a breath so hard I very nearly choked it back out again. This _wasn't_ the Matrix: I wasn't "the One" here, or whatever else I may or may not be, Sentinels aside. I was just a guy, and Trinity, for all her wiry strength and skill, wouldn't be defying gravity and easily slipping his hold.... in this world, a blade like that was enough to take her life. And in her eyes, no matter how much she might have denied it, was a fervent plea for me to do _something._ An echo of _Neo, **I trust you.**_

Oh God, Trin, when it comes down to the wire, I'd die for you. But is that enough to save you now?

And then Bane _laughed._ "Insane? Hardly. It might appear that way to you, but Mister Anderson and I know that appearances can be deceiving. Are _always_ deceiving, in fact: and I have never been _more_ in control of my faculties. Confused, Mr. Anderson?" Another jagged laugh that was like glass shards across my nerve endings. "It'll all become clear in a moment. Now, thank you for the gun." He curled his lip, and something in my stomach shuddered and revolted at the vague _familiarity_ in that gesture. "Set it down there, and back off."

Before I could even begin to calculate a response, Trinity's urgent hiss: "Don't do it! Shoot!"

Yeah, Trin. I'll shoot. Right through you, to get to him. And then, when you've both collapsed in a smoking heap on the deck and it was my hands that did it, I'll congratulate myself on having saved my own life.

The rising mock behind her voice: _"Yes._ Shoot. Burn us, go ahead, _do_ it, Mister Anderson."

My hands trembled.

Oh God, _Trinity._

"Neo..." a desperate whisper, with a trace of anger now. _Anger?_ Yeah, that was my Trinity: when it came to the end, she was as brave as they come. Willing to lay down her life so that I might do whatever it was I needed to do. So that I might survive. And in that moment I _hated_ it, hated Fate, hated _everything. _All of it. A flash of fury and agony. "Neo, _shoot. _If you don't do it he'll kill both of us."

Whatever had happened before I got there, there was absolute certainty in her voice. She had no illusions.

I lifted my head slowly, so slowly, then. Our eyes met. And in a convulsive wave that rocked me in its power, I saw that _she_ saw that I couldn't do it. No. No, no, no. There had to be another way. I'd find it. I'd jump him, batter him, kill him. Somehow wrench her free from his deranged grasp, as long as there was hope, there was a way, and I'd let him kill me before I let him... and...

...and Bane saw the change in my eyes, too.

_"Look_ at him," he spat, with another of those vicious, mocking snorts of laughter. "All big-eyed, like a puppy. He knows he should do it, he knows she's right, but he won't. He can't _bring_ himself to do it. Always the _hero."_

Trinity saw the tension leave my hands and her eyes closed for the barest fraction of a second. When she opened them again she shook her head at me, ever so slightly, and if we'd been anywhere else I would have been instantly shamed by that gesture. She didn't whisper _"Do it",_ as some people may have thought: no. What passed her lips was a single, frustrated adjective.

_"Stupid."_

You would have done the same for me, Trin. Always, until the end. This is a measure of our loyalty.

I crouched, never taking my eyes from Bane -- and the blade at Trinity's throat -- and set the gun on the deck. No thought, no planning, no nothing. I was running on instinct and fear. Whatever would happen from here on out came down to nothing but me, Trin, and our own survival. No help was coming.

I stood up.

The smirk in his voice was as clear as any Matrix neon had ever been, and in that instant I had never wanted anything as badly as to batter it off his face, out of his tone. "Back away from the gun. Turn around."

My stomach rolled over again, and something not only in his tone but in the command to turn my back did something terrible to my insides. _If he's going to kill her, wouldn't he want me to watch? _ But I think, even now, that if he had ordered me to my knees with my hands behind my back in preparation for a full-on execution or whatever else, I would have done it. Just to give Trinity that one single chance to make a break for it. To save herself, if not us both. After all, I'd already cheated death. My luck wasn't endless.

Slowly, my throat clicking as I swallowed and my shoulders squared, I turned to face the partition. A sort of calm had settled over me by then, chasing out the panic, the doubt. Had I reached inside and found some sort of Zen Neo? I doubt it. I think I had simply reached the point where very little mattered to me: and I had everything to lose. And with that realization came a breed of confidence, a flash of anger, something dark and heavy and vicious. When I opened my mouth again, my voice was no longer trembling: and my hands, fisted now at my sides, weren't either. Cocking my head to the side so that I could _sense_ him, out of my peripheral vision. In that moment I would have killed: and killed calmly.

"Let her go."

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Yes: it will be continued. As soon as I can manage it. This isn't, actually, easy.

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